Book of the week: Nuclear Folly

published 14 May 2021

Having started out writing “very funny” literary novels, Rachel Cusk has switched more recently to “austere” auto-fiction, said John Self in The Times. Second Place is “a synthesis of old and new” – an experimental, philosophically-minded novel that also has “big characters” and some “truly funny” jokes.

M, the narrator, is a writer who lives with her husband in a house on the coast. She invites a painter she admires to stay in its annexe (the “second place” of the title), but he brings along an uninvited companion – an “authentically awful” younger woman. Though not flawless, Second Place is a fascinating work from “one of our most interesting writers”.

There are moments of “brave, sharp insight”, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times. But the novel is an odd concoction. The symbolism is clunky. Cusk’s “oddly fustian” prose starts “to sound like a cut-price Victorian novelist” – and “for no apparent reason”, M narrates the novel to someone called Jeffers, whom we never meet. A note at the end clears up some of this, but it can’t resolve the “central, baffling question. Why did Rachel Cusk write this book?”